Why You Feel So Fucking Lonely

Capitalist cultural hegemony turned a species based on cooperation and community into legions of solitary contestants.

Photograph by Khoa Võ.

For 99.99% of existence, homo sapiens and their former transmutations were spared useless inquiries concerning meanings of life, what follows death, the universe’s beginning, its end, and so on. Humans just lived, same as all else that crawls, slithers, walks, runs, swims, flies on this faint blue dot in black oblivion.

Yet such is our fate that we can no longer afford to just dilly-dally our lives away, enjoy the present, appreciate each other and the simple delights a life does offer on occasion. The past paralyzes the present, a slithering fog with long, bloody talons cast in childhood trauma and teenage ordeal, and the future looms like an open casket, an invitation to enter, make yourself comfortable, and never find rest until that one final nap.

This rather novel state of restless, questioning, anxious endurance — the conscious mind — culminating for the time being in the modern capitalist experience has, in its merciless pathway of obliteration, invaded upon the one thing we homo sapiens have valued across continents, generations, geological epochs: community.

The new neighbors

Do you ever feel the need to talk to those new neighbors who just moved in, introduce yourself, perhaps have a chat and a beer, but you can’t bring yourself to do it?

It would be nice to know them, you think, but something is stopping you — the fact that no one here knows their neighbors, the fear of appearing creepy or needy, the thought of embarrassing yourself, the crippling anxiety, soon to be drowned in the dopamine embrace of the glaring screen. So, you don’t. You never get to know your neighbors. You greet them, from time to time, when directly confronted, a slightly awkward wave, like the Queen acknowledging her peasant masses, superficially friendly but so very, very distant, and otherwise remain in your tiny flat, a hermit, a practicing monk, an increasingly radicalized husk.

The lost community

Ours is a time of constant worry and anxiety. The hustle is real, and it spares no one but the wealthy, those aliens in golden cages, strangers to the common plight. Money makes the world go round, round, round, and our quest for the riches of this world begins as soon as we’re granted leave from the educational institution.

For most, it’s easy to have friends in school, at least one or two good ones, at the very least one person to talk to, share anxieties and joys. But when that community inevitably crumbles — give it a couple of years after school, at the most — many find themselves stranded on an isolated beach, on some isolated island, in the middle of an ocean. University is not what it was, and for those with hobbies other than alcohol, drugs, and parties it’s never been that great anyway.

Islands in an ocean

Some like to imagine themselves beyond ideology, beyond cultural hegemony, anything that diminishes their feelings of self-determination and the meritocracy they wish was real. In truth, no one is beyond such things. We are creatures made by and for each other. Cooperation fueled our intelligence, our one evolutionary advantage besides being able to walk without tiring for a very long time. Without cooperation there is no consciousness, and without consciousness no Reddit, League of Legends, iPhone, Netflix.

Often enough, these people are the same ones proclaiming the merits of competition and capitalist growth-mind-sets. We must learn, work, then work some more, then hustle, climb the ladder, make sure others acknowledge our climbing the ladder — absolutely make sure of that! — then make more of us, doomed to climbing the same ladder that leads to nowhere. Few realize how painful the ladder is. There are sharp splinters everywhere, it hurts to climb, and once you near the top you realize there is nothing but empty air beneath.

The Office

The Office can be considered the pinnacle of human evolution. Nothing can compare in artificiality, futility, and dystopian vibe.

The profound alienation of corporate emailing, the sheer desperation of meetings, the abyss of Excel sheets, the boredom of slow decades, a life ground to dust. The Office is our one true achievement. Our quest of rising above nature, face to face with God, creators of destiny, defeaters of the primal, the instinct, the basic needs, is fulfilled in The Office. Nowhere do we feel stranger. Nowhere are we less biological. Nowhere are we lonelier. Colleagues seldom turn out friends.

Not of the Natural World

Workers of the world

What remains of community after modern civilization is done stomping its black-leather-boots is most often excavated in the depths of the physical worker. Here, the simple, mostly bullshit-free labor becomes a source of bonding. Here, where hollow niceties and etiquette find no fertile soil, true conversation and understanding happen.

Few lifelong academics and corporates can grasp the profound warmth of unrestricted banter. Those waiters, construction workers, and cleaning ladies have friends. It comes with a price: broken bodies, material sobriety, disrespect.

Impoverished of the world

What applies to the blue collar applies to the collarless. Where industry has yet to conquer community, families and neighborhoods can endure. This, also, comes with a price.

The Great Capitalist Lie (Part One)

Nuclear family

The one thing the Orwellian machine has deemed worth preserving is the fertile union between man and woman. The fruits of said union are consequently consumed by the machine.

It is man, mostly, whose solitary source of comfort and socialization is found in the partner. Once that partner vanishes, as is so often the case, the man finds himself anchorless, drifting on a vast ocean, wherever winds carry him. Robbed of partner and child, without friends and support networks, this man becomes the perfect specimen for right-wing hate and radicalization. Tragically, he brutalizes his now ex-wife, for it is always the woman’s fault. The pandemic of male loneliness is a pandemic of femicides.

Even without this, the nuclear family is a tragedy in and of itself. I speak from experience.

Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and the Apocalypse

Speaking of plagues, one must also mention the plight of younger generations; perhaps the loneliest, most isolated, most alienated cohort to walk this earth. Anti-social social media does nothing to alleviate the pain, but Andrew Tate and drugs, lots of them, do. The progressive ultra-liberal West once again, inevitably, always, in the mauling fangs of conservatism and its fascist brother.

With nothing to work for, nothing to hope for, nothing to do but wait for climate and otherwise destruction: culture wars, real wars, wherever one turns.

Why you feel so fucking lonely

It doesn’t have to be this way.

We are ducks floating on a pond of ideology and culture with depths unknown, made on the pond, born on the pond, yet we can choose to fly away in search of different ponds. Because we are ingenious, adaptable, and enduring ducks, we can even make our own Goddamn ponds.

Thanks for reading,

Antonio Melonio

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